Remake

I’d apparently had quite a night that night. I had tried to walk through the skids wall like a druggate on too much rave and then popped the wrong person. A wonderful performance, Andrew.

And Alis had saved me. I took the skids down to Hollywood Boulevard to look for her, checking at Screen Test City and at A Star Is Born, which had a River Phoenix lookalike working there. The Happy Endings booth had changed its name to Happily Ever After and was featuring Dr. Zhivago, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the field of flowers, smiling and holding a baby. A knot of half-interested tourates were watching it.

“I’m looking for a face,” I said.

“Take your pick,” the guy said. “Lara, Scarlett, Marilyn—”

“We were down here a few months ago,” I said, trying to jog his memory. “We talked about Casablanca…”

“I got Casablanca,” he said. “I got Wuthering Heights, Love Story—”

“This face,” I interrupted. “She’s about so high, light brown hair—”

“Freelancer?” he said.

“No,” I said. “Never mind.”

I walked on. There was nothing else on this side except VR caves. I stood there and thought about them, and about the simsex parlors farther down and the freelancers hustling out in front of them in torn net leotards, and then went back to Happily Ever After.

“Casablanca,” I said, pushing in front of the tourates, who’d decided to get in line. I slapped down my card.

The guy led me inside. “You got a happy ending for it?” he asked.

“You bet.”

He sat me down in front of the comp, an ancient-looking Wang. “Now what you do is push this button, and your choices’ll come up on the screen. Push the one you want. Good luck.”

I rotated the airplane forty degrees, flattened it to two-dimensional, and made it look like the cardboard it had been. I’d never seen a fog machine. I settled for a steam engine, spewing out great belching puffs of cloud, and ff’d to the three-quarters’ shot of Bogie telling Ingrid, “We’ll always have Paris.”

“Expand frame perimeter,” I said, and started filling in their feet, Ingrid in flats and Bogie in lifts, big chunky blocks of wood strapped to his shoes with pieces of—

“What in hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy said, bursting in.

“Just trying to inject a little reality into the proceedings,” I said.

He shoved me out of the chair and started pushing keys. “Get out of here.”

The tourates who’d been ahead of me were standing in front of the screen, and a little crowd had formed around them.

“The plane was cardboard and the airplane mechanics were midgets,” I said. “Bogie was only five four. Fred Astaire was the son of an immigrant brewery worker. He only had a sixth-grade education.”

The guy emerged from the booth steaming like my fog machine.

“ ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ took seventeen takes,” I said, heading toward the skids. “None of it’s real. It’s all done with mirrors.”

SCENE: Exterior. The Hardy house in winter. Dirty snow on roof, lawn, piled on either side of front walk. Slow dissolve to spring.

I don’t remember whether I went back down to Hollywood Boulevard again. I know I went to the parties, hoping Alis would show up in the doorway again, but not even Heada was there.

In between, I raped and pillaged and looked for something easy to fix. There wasn’t anything. Sobering up the doctor in Stagecoach ruined the giving birth scene. D.O.A. went dead on arrival without Dana Andrews slugging back shots of whiskey, and The Thin Man disappeared altogether.

I called up the menu again, looking for something AS-free, something clean-cut and all-American. Like Alis’s musicals.

“Musicals,” I said, and the menu chopped itself into categories and put up a list. I scrolled through it.

Not Carousel. Billy Bigelow was a lush. So was Ava Gardner in Showboat and Van Johnson in Brigadoon. Guys and Dolls? No dice. Marlon Brando’d gotten a missionary splatted on rum. Gigi? It was full of liquor and cigars, not to mention “The Night They Invented Champagne.”

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers? Maybe. It didn’t have any saloon scenes or “Belly Up To The Bar, Boys” numbers. Maybe some applejack at the barnraising or in the cabin, nothing that couldn’t be taken out with a simple wipe.